One of our favorite things to do in the Bay Area is to see a show in a place with a history, like San Francisco’s The Chapel, an old mortuary that’s now a concert venue, and Club Fugazi, which began life as a social club for immigrants.
So that’s part of why we’re so excited about Ceremony across the bay in Oakland, which will be opening next month, as reported by KQED, as a live music venue inside a historic theater (the Fox Oakland knows that’s a recipe for success). Ceremony sits on Broadway, in a space squarely in front of the escalators down to the 12th Street BART station that was once home to the Lux Theatre. The venue will have a 1,000-person capacity and will showcase touring rap, R&B, punk, queer pop and Latin artists, as well as comedians, local performers and DJ nights.
While there’s no website yet, Ceremony—whose logo styles its “O” as a flame—has an Instagram presence with some events already listed, including opening night, March 7, with a DJ event titled “A New Ritual with Andre Power.” Early bird pricing starts at $19 for the 21-plus show with Andre Power, J. Jaxx and a back-to-back-to-back set with Dom Izzo, MicahTron and Tittsworth.
Ceremony’s ground floor is 6,000 square foot along with a second-floor mezzanine. There will be two bars flanking the dance floor and a kitchen for food and snacks. The music will be pumped out via a D&B Audiotechnik sound system.
Rewinding back three quarters of a century, the Lux opened in 1948 as a first-run theater with 550 seats that in later decades lapsed into a second-run house showing horror, kung fu and Blaxploitation movies. Its most recent iteration was as a Goodwill, for which the city of Oakland required the removal of the theater’s dramatic chevron-shaped marquee (you can see where it was, just above the mural of a woman in a purple niqab). The Goodwill closed in 2019 and the space has been vacant since then. And in a funny/sad turn, co-owner Dominic Green (with Jesse Tittsworth) told KQED he was encouraged by the city to add a marquee. Huh. Currently, beautiful murals created during the pandemic cover the building’s façade, and the Art Deco terra cotta cladding with decorative detail at the roofline is still in place. The building is part of the Downtown Oakland Historic District and listed on the National Register of Historic Places.
Of the old theater, local artist Gary Parks wrote on the Cinema Treasures website, “The Lux marquee was originally to have been retained in the conversion to a Goodwill store in the mid-eighties… I photographed the marquee shortly before its removal. It was a particularly fine example, with rings and rings of horizontal neon in green, yellow, red and white.” Another commenter on Cinema Treasures noted the shiny chrome ticket booth and hot dog window which are sadly no longer there.
Green and Tittsworth are also behind Crybaby nightclub on Telegraph, kitty-corner from the Fox, which occupies part of the insanely pretty blue and silver Art Deco Floral Depot Building. That venue opened in 2022.